By agoudsward
It's a strange thing watching momentous events in your home country on the "international news." Especially when what happened in itself is so bewildering and distressing. Hearing the reaction of foreign media talking about a potential strongman taking power and a massive protest movement mobilizing in response, you could close your eyes and easily think it was in some far flung corner of the world. I'd heard talk like that on the news many times, but never about America, never about home.
I'm talking of course about the presidential election. I stayed up until dawn watching the results in London and, then since I was on fall break, headed to Amsterdam to spend a couple of days away. Of course my tour group of American study abroad students wanted to talk about what happened and my Dutch tour guide wondered "why Americans always do things that are irrational." One unexpected thing about studying abroad, not only do you learn more about other countries, but you learn more about your own.
All this of course made the trip to the Anne Franke House extra sobering. Not that I think we're headed toward anything similar in the U.S., but a quote by Otto Frank, Anne's father, in the guidebook really struck me. "We cannot change what happened anymore. The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means." It's not so clear to me how we're doing with that.
Overall, however, my trip to Amsterdam was much more joyful. It is a stunning and exceedingly quirky city. It was kind of refreshing how Dutch culture really doesn't take it self too seriously. There are grandiose Greek columns in one of the main square that say, in Latin, "wise men do not pea into the wind," their national church has an exhibit on Marilyn Monroe, and the three X's on the cities flag have been adapted to be a reference to the number of titles won by the city's soccer team. London is very heavily on self-serious tradition and that's interesting in itself, but it was nice to be in a country that was not afraid to mock itself... and others. After a trying week, I think it was what was needed.